A famous US politician shot. Nuclear missiles positioned close to an enemy superpower. A nervous world wonders, ‘What next?”. It happened in the 1960s; it’s happening again today. We need a good song to wake us up.

Dylan’s break-through from songwriter to counter-culture prophet occurred a couple of months after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a year out from the assassination of President Kennedy. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was recorded – famously – in one take in December 1962, a couple of months after the world held its breath and waited for Armageddon.

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard

And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

He initially clattered it out as a poem on his typewriter a few months earlier in a world edgy with Cold War tensions, in an atmosphere with more than a whiff of Plutonium and turmoil in the air.

Thom Donovan, writing in American Songwriter said: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is a revelation song. It’s a beat-poet psalm with an end-of-times warning … It represents a feeling of hopelessness. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg famously wept the first time he heard the song.”

Things have not changed a lot since then. We are in the midst of a crisis that is at least as dangerous as 1962. It centres once more on a super-power intent on placing missile systems in the enemy’s backyard. The US........

© Pearls and Irritations